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Page 70
Grandmother said she hadn't a doubt of it.
Certainly Cutter liked to have his wife think him a devil. In some way he
depended upon the excitement He could arouse in her hysterical nature.
Perhaps he got the feeling of being a rake more from his wife's rage and
amazement than from any experiences of his own. His zest in debauchery
might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter's belief in it. The reckoning with his
wife at the end of an escapade was something he counted on--like the last
powerful liqueur after a long dinner. The one excitement he really
couldn't do without was quarrelling with Mrs. Cutter!
BOOK III
Lena Lingard
I
AT THE UNIVERSITY I had the good fortune to come immediately under the
influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had
arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as
head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations, he was my examiner, and my course was
arranged under his supervision.
I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,
working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering
the freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to New
England, and, except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln
all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. I
shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the
happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas;
when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all
that went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals;
some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.
In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had
come up to the university from the farms and the little towns scattered
over the thinly settled state. Some of those boys came straight from the
cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through the
four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really heroic
self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering pioneer
school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few enthusiastic young
men just out of graduate schools. There was an atmosphere of endeavour, of
expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted
its head from the prairie only a few years before.
Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no
college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms
with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their
children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near the
open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and on
that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom, originally
a linen-closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to contain my
cot-bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The dresser,
and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my hats and
shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them non-existent, as
children eliminate incongruous objects when they are playing house. I
worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly in front of the
west window which looked out over the prairie. In the corner at my right
were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted myself. On the blank
wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper was covered by a large
map of ancient Rome, the work of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered
it for me when he was sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase
hung a photograph of the Tragic Theatre at Pompeii, which he had given me
from his collection.
When I sat at work I half-faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for
an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and
become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if he
found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures-- a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were almost
as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again, he would
sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English poetry, or
telling me about his long stay in Italy.
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